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Who Will Save Alexei Navalny?
Michael Weiss on Yahoo News
Thu, April 22, 2021
“If you saw me now—maybe you would have a good laugh,” Alexei Navalny wrote on Facebook April 20. “Look at him! A skeleton walking, wobbling around his prison cell. In his hands he is holding his court ruling, rolled up in a tube. With that tube he fervently swings away at mosquitoes covering the walls and the ceiling of his cell. Those buzzing stinging monsters can finish up a man faster than any hunger strike.”
The tone is characteristic of the world’s most famous political prisoner: comic stoicism in the face of approaching death combined with a Gogolian fascination for all the absurdities and trivialities still imposed by a cruel Russian system responsible for its arrival.
Navalny has been starving himself for three weeks. It is a feeble protest, perhaps, against being an involuntary guest of a 21st century gulag, but at least it is wholly his own. For someone who eight months ago was almost killed with a weapon of mass destruction (Novichok), Navalny seems determined to go on being Navalny until the very end, which could be “any minute” now, according to his physician who has not been allowed to examine his patient and can only make diagnoses from afar, based on blood test results.
Navalny risks kidney failure and cardiac arrest owing to abnormally high levels of potassium and creatinine in his blood (“After Novichok,” Navalny wrote, “potassium is not a biggie”). He has been transferred from one miserable penal facility to another where he is now on a regimen of “vitamin therapy.”
No one believes Navalny is being treated; rather, he is being gradually murdered in an internationally exhibited snuff film executive produced and directed by Vladimir Putin.
“I think they will kill him,” a former senior U.S. official, someone I typically turn to for good news, not bad, told me this week. “I don’t think they’ll do a last-minute release back to Germany [where Navalny recuperated from his Novichok poisoning last August] or something like that. Their goal is to watch Navalny slowly die in prison.”
And what can the United States do, or better yet, what is it willing to do to stop “them” and this obscenity? Judging by President Joe Biden’s rhetoric, not much. Navalny’s plight, Biden told reporters last week, was “totally, totally unfair, totally inappropriate,” which is something one says of a lousy referee call on the pitch, not live-streamed, slow-motion homicide.
The messaging, however, is clear: Putin may be a soulless killer but he nevertheless runs an aggressive nuclear hyperpower with which the United States seeks to have “a stable and predictable relationship,” as the White House readout of Biden’s call with him on April 13 stated. Good luck with that, you might say, but the readout ended by telegraphing Biden’s openness to a “summit meeting in a third country in the coming months.” It made no mention of Navalny, who may well be dead by then.
The backdrop to this cautiously extended olive branch is also obvious: the Russian Army could very well be in a “third country” uninvited in the coming days: Ukraine.
As of this writing there are reportedly anywhere between 80,000 and 100,000 Russian troops currently deployed to occupied Crimea and the Russian border of the Donbas, itself occupied by undeclared Russian soldiers and intelligence officers masquerading as “separatists.” These troops are joined by a steady increase in warplanes, attack helicopters, tanks, cruise missiles and all the other matériel necessary for a conventional invasion.
Is one forthcoming or is this just a well-choreographed intimidation exercise intended more for Washington’s sake than for Kyiv’s? Russia’s Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu ordered a partial withdrawal from the border a day after Putin’s annual press conference April 21, in which the Russian president spoke of “red lines” against “insults and interference, including in elections,” and he darkly insinuated that the U.S. had just failed to assassinate his client, Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko, a claim White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said has “no basis in fact.” Last year, the fear among Russia watchers from Washington to Tallinn was that Putin might intervene militarily in Belarus, if not annex the entire country in a definitive move to quell a rising protest movement over stolen election and expand Russian hard power closer into NATO’s backyard. Now, he threatens to re-invade Ukraine.
Biden would no doubt think it more than “unfair” and “inappropriate” of his having to navigate any hot crisis in Easter Europe within the first year of his presidency. A pandemic still rages, China rises, and the U.S. has to withdraw from a 20-year campaign in Afghanistan, to say nothing of roiling domestic cultural crises.
Moreover, Biden already has his hands full with peaceful Europe. See Czechia’s recent disclosure that in 2014, a team of Russian military intelligence operatives blew up an ammunition depot in a village in the east of the country. And not just any operatives: two of them, Col. Alexander Mishkin and Col. Anatoly Chepiga, were the assassins responsible for later trying to murder Emilian Gebrev, a Bulgarian arms dealer in Sofia in 2015 and the former intelligence officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury in 2018. Mishkin and Chepiga’s weapon of choice in both instances was Novichok in what may have been proof of concept for the later operation to kill Russia’s opposition leader, at least the first time around.
National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan told CNN there would be “consequences” if Russia eliminated Navalny in prison. What kind? Sullivan did not elaborate. Nor do we know if he relayed them to Nikolai Patrushev, the chairman of the Russian Security Council, with whom he has his own phone call this week, this one ending with “let’s keep in touch.”
Presumably Navalny would rather Sullivan got his retaliation in first, as a form of deterrence. But neither the U.S. nor E.U. seems eager to impose sanctions before Navalny’s demise. And Angela Merkel, once Navalny’s primary caretaker-in-exile, has reaffirmed her commitment to Russia’s controversial Nord-Stream 2 natural gas pipeline to Europe, which the U.S. opposes.
What about sanctioning those hemisphere-hopping Russian oligarchs Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation named when he was first arrested upon his arrival back in Moscow from Berlin in January? That list was divided in three categories, the last two consisting of Russian human rights abusers and those specifically linked to Navalny’s persecution. But the first category is the one that would rattle the Kremlin the most: “Oligarchs upon whom Putin has bestowed wealth and power, and who wield it on behalf of the regime.”
The official excuse I hear from U.S. policymakers is that designating “oligarchs for being oligarchs isn’t how sanctions work.” Washington has to establish a predicate offense. The unofficial excuse I hear is that going after foreign billionaires who act as agents or plenipotentiaries of the Kremlin abroad is embarrassing because they’re so deeply entrenched in the Western financial system—banks, media companies, sports clubs, and real estate. Doing so would only expose the West’s see-no-evil policy with respect to money-laundering, lobbying and kleptocracy, the taints of which should now be obvious to anyone who survived the Trump era.
Putting our own house in order might make it more difficult for Putin to destroy his since there’s no use stealing in Moscow what you can’t spend in London, Paris and New York. As Navalny’s aide Vladimir Milov told me recently, “You don’t have to separate the human rights agenda from realpolitik. They’re inextricable now.”
And so, all across Russia’s eleven time zones, the people have done what they can and turned out to demonstrate for the dying hunger striker who has spent a decade telling them with blog posts and YouTube videos that they deserve better. Again we have seen the stirring scenes of young and old defy riot police and arbitrary detention in an authoritarian state. The solidarity and support have already made a difference to the prisoner. “[T]here is no better weapon against injustice and lawlessness,” Navalny wrote. “This is what keeps me alive right now. Despite the very high level of potassium.”
We in the West are left to hope it will work—while secretly suspecting, like the former U.S. official, that it won’t.
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A DOCTOR FOR imprisoned Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who is in the third week of a hunger strike, said his health is deteriorating rapidly and the Kremlin critic could be on the verge of death.
Physician Yaroslav Ashikhmin said that test results he received from the 44-year-old’s family show him with sharply elevated levels of potassium, which can bring on cardiac arrest, and heightened creatinine levels that indicate impaired kidneys.
“Our patient could die at any moment,” he said in a Facebook post.
Anastasia Vasilyeva, head of the Navalny-backed Alliance of Doctors union, said on Twitter that “action must be taken immediately”
.
Navalny is Russian President Vladimir Putin’s most visible and adamant opponent.
His personal physicians have not been allowed to see him in prison. He went on hunger strike to protest the refusal to let them visit when he began experiencing severe back pain and a loss of feeling in his legs.
Russia’s state penitentiary service has said that Navalny is receiving all the medical help he needs.
Navalny was arrested on January 17 when he returned to Russia from Germany, where had spent five months recovering from Soviet nerve-agent poisoning that he blames on the Kremlin.
Russian officials have denied any involvement and even questioned whether he was poisoned, which was confirmed by several European laboratories.
Asked about Navalny’s worsening condition, US President Joe Biden told reporters: “It’s totally, totally unfair and totally inappropriate. On the basis of having the poison and then on a hunger strike.”
Navalny was ordered to serve two-and-a-half years in prison on the grounds that his long recovery in Germany violated a suspended sentence he had been given for a fraud conviction in a case that he says was politically motivated.
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HOW do we interpret the recent 'STORMING of the US CAPITOL'? How does it compare with, for example, The Storming of the Bastille in 1789 in Paris in 1789 or The Storming of the Winter Palace in Petrograd in 1920? Perhaps it's too early to tell!
DO ACTIONS SPEAK LOUDER THAN WORDS?
My departmental supervisor at Manchester Poly, John Phillips (Oxford), claimed when I did my thesis on conversational analysis argued that J.L.Austin, who had developed a theory of speech acts, that he had overlooked the alternative arguement that there was a case that there were also acts that could say some thing: 'words' may be able to do some things but 'acts' may be able to say some things. John Phillips gave as an example an episode in 'Shane' in which Shane played by Alan Ladd accounters a dirt farmer in the first scene, and without a word being uttered a conversation of actions take place in which the actor's recognise what is require and what is understood by the participants.
At the time I think we'd been studying language and conversational analysis in particular John Langshaw Austin (26 March 1911 – 8 February 1960), who was a British philosopher of language and leading proponent of ordinary language philosophy, perhaps best known for developing the theory of speech acts.
John Phillips was at the time in the 1970s keen to stress that actions can speak louder than words. In this context perhaps the storming of the US Capitol on the 6th, Janauary 2021, may well serve to speak volumes hisorically just as the earlier storming of the Bastille and Winter Palace did.
CHOMSKY on 'The FRAGILITY of AMERICAN DEMOCRACY'
To help us grasp what's going on in the US perhaps we should consider an interview on the 26 November 2020 with Noam Chomsky: 'Trump Has Revealed the Extreme Fragility of American Democracy' in what was presented as an exchange with C. J. Polychroniou Chomsky stated:
'Speculation of course, but I’ll indulge in a bad dream — which could become reality if we are not on guard, and if we fail to recognize that elections should be a brief interlude in a life of engaged activism, not a time to go home and leave matters in the hands of the victors.
'I suspect that Trump and associates regard their legal challenges as a success in what seems a plausible strategy: keep the pot boiling and keep the loyal base at fever pitch, furious about the “stolen” election and the efforts of the insidious elites and the “deep state” to remove their savior from office.
'That strategy seems to be working well. According to recent polls, “Three-quarters (77%) of Trump backers say Biden’s win was due to fraud” and “The anger among Trump’s base is tied to a belief that the election was stolen.” Rejection of the legal challenges with ridicule may please liberal circles, but for the base, it may be simply more proof of the Trump thesis: the hated elites will stop at nothing in their machinations.'
This conclusion by Chomsky that the 'Trump thesis: the hated elites will stop at nothing in their machinations' fits in with the concept that Trumpism is conceived as challenging the established liberal managerial elites. Chomsky himself has long complained that the politics in the US has been simply a choice between Coka Cola and Pepsi Cola.
Now we have Trump and Trumpism, did this break the mould of the managerial elite or not? Were the Clintons corrupt as many of the invaders of the Capitol complained? Does democracy need to be rescued from the managers, and is even Professor Chomsky part of the managerial elite as a dominant figure in the US community of scholars?
The Managerial Elite & American Politics
Perhaps we should examine these considerationa further by examining a review in October 2020 on the Chronicle's website, in which Pedro Gonzalez commenting on 'The New Class War: Saving Democracy From the Managerial Elite' by Michael Lind, writes:
'As Lind sees it, the country’s political institutions are a façade for the corporate state, while our government is merely an instrument for the rootless transnational elite and avaricious politicians, both of whom are aided by a vast army of bureaucrats teeming with resentment for those whose lives they manage. The managed—that is, the rest of us—are lumped into a racially divided, proletarianesque working-class, with a largely native-born, white core.'
Gillian Tett in her column in this weekend's Financial Times has argued that Western elites tend to assume that their way of thinking is the only valid mode of thought'. She quotes from Joseph Henrich, the evolutionary biologist and anthropologist, who in his book 'The Weidest People in the World' comparing to the mentality of Western, Educated, Industrialised. Rich and Democratic people against other more tribalistic groups.
Hendrich believes most societies throughout history have used different mental approaches: they see morality as context-based, presuming that someone's identity is set by family and, adopting a "holistic reasoning" rather than "analytical reasoning". "Analytic thinkers see in straight lines," Hendrich writes "Holistic thinkers focus not on the parts but the whole... and expect time trends to be non-linear, if not cyclical."
Gillian Tett concludes Trump has captured the tribal 'non-linear' approach of those who resent what they see as the elite managerial class and she writes:
'Here lies the epistemological split - and the futility of elites invoking "reason" to persuade Trump voters to rethink their convictions. Words alone will not heal America. Neither will the law, nor logical analysis of the constitution. What is desperately required is empathy... You can only counter the legacy of Trump if you first grasp why he was so potent to start with.'
Was Trumpism really a threat to what Chomsky use to call the Pepsi Cola and Coca Cola tradition of American politics? Whatever was the case, Professor Chomsky recently urged the public to vote for Joe Biden. Perhaps he prefers the Status Quo after all?
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LAST weekend the Sunday Post newspaper carried a piece about how a request had been made for a US military plane to be allowed to land at Prestwich airport on the day before the swearing in of Joe Biden as the next US president. There has been speculation that Donald Trump will be on that plane.
Boris Johnson has condemned what he called the "disgraceful scenes" in the US, after supporters of Donald Trump stormed Congress and clashed with police. The Senate minority leader has placed responsibility for what happened on Trump
.
Is it too much to ask that Johnson should refuse to allow Trump to use the UK as a bolt hole in a fortnight’s time?
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